


Wandered and Was Lost

by Masu_Trout



Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Denial of Feelings, M/M, Obsession, Pining, hatred to love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-21
Updated: 2019-02-21
Packaged: 2019-10-26 15:19:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17748353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Masu_Trout/pseuds/Masu_Trout
Summary: The courier walks the wasteland.Ulysses follows.





	Wandered and Was Lost

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gayporwave](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gayporwave/gifts).



Ulyssses never meant to dwell on the courier. When he recommended the man for the job, he acted only as the impartial hand of justice. His pointing out a name on a list was the only retribution the Divide would ever get.

He isn't prepared, weeks later, for the name he starts to hear on people's lips.

Not the man's name. Not exactly. But there is no other person it could be.

 _Courier Six_ , people say. House's courier. Survived a gunshot wound to the head, met the Legion at Cottonwood and lived, walked into the Lucky 38 like he owned the place. The campfire tales couriers tell, of ghosts and heroes and treacherous paths, have a new set of stories in circulation.

("Did you hear?" says a boy of no more than sixteen, his face streaked with dirt, his eyes bright with admiration, "That courier of House's killed the Fiends out near Camp McCarren, just shot 'em all straight in the head," and it is all Ulysses can do not to reach across the fire and strike him.)

Each new story he hears, he thinks it must be the last. Only so long one man can survive out in the Mojave. Especially taking on trouble like he is: the Strip, the Khans, the Boomers. The man makes enemies of the powerful and allies of the unstable. Bear and Bull are both watching him now, claws and horns ready to crush his throat. 

But every time Ulysses thinks he's finally rid of the man—another story. The legend does not diminish. It only grows until it is a great looming tower, taller than any Strip casino, casting shadows across the desert. Soon it will be too big for even death to topple.

Ulysses has borne much. He cannot bear this. Cannot stand _this man_ becoming a hero, being honored as if the corpses left buried behind him don't matter.

No. No, he won't allow it. Ulysses decides that over dinner one night, sitting in front of his campfire with the smell of roasted meat hanging in the air, and then he nods to himself. Finishes the last of his meal, kicks out the last ashes of his fire. Wraps his flag around his back.

The subtle approach has not worked. The courier is here still. Travelling where he pleases, interfering in everyone's plans. No more concerned now about what messages he carries than he was on that day.

Ulysses will find the man. He'll follow him, watch him, understand finally how the wasteland could birth a creature such as this. And then...

His spear is a heavy weight in his hands. Not too heavy to carry. There's room on his body to mark one more murder yet.

Find him. End him. And then, finally, let the Divide rest.

He feels the rightness of the plan all the way down to his bones.

-

When Ulysses first finds the courier, he thinks of him by the name he once saw written across the roster papers for House's delivery. It's not long, though, before he stops thinking of him as anything other than _the courier_ , because the courier does not have a name. 

Or, rather, the courier does not have _a_ name.

The courier collects names like they're bottle caps. Woman out near Novac hears Ulysses asking questions about the man who just passed through and says, "Oh, you mean Mantis?" Group of brahmin-herders the courier travels with for a week all call him Thomas, admiration in their voices as they watch him pop a bloatfly from a hundred paces with a varmint rifle. Legion-soldier, Legion-slave spits on the ground where he's crouched with his leg broken through the skin, snarls the name _Patricus_ with hatred in his voice, and the courier doesn't correct him even as he slips his gun free of its holster and sends a quick clean bullet between the wounded man's eyes. 

(Not a Twisted Hairs body that hits the dry-packed earth then, Ulysses doesn't think, he doesn't recognize the face and he doesn't remember their faces anymore and above all he _does not care_. Not his home, not his people, not a place he can go back to. They were nomads, all of them; nothing left after the fox burned it, no corpse of a city left to stand vigil for the way he stands for the Divide. Just ranks of born-anew Legion soldiers, their heads shorn bare. And Ulysses.) 

Hard to tell where he gets all those names, at first, until Ulysses watches him talk to a caravan guard named Hunter and then, next outpost he stops at, introduce himself with a crooked smile and a four-fingered handshake as, "Hunter, they call me, pleasure to meet you."

He's looting them, Ulysses realizes then. Remaking his own identity in the images of the living and the dead alike.

(And yes, he is Ulysses. Named not for the traveler of old but the great unifier. There is a difference to it, he tells himself, he is not guilty of the things that he hates the courier for. They're both messengers; that is the only true similarity between them.)

It's a warm summer night, and Ulysses is sitting in an alcove of a burned out building in a small tribal town. He watches as the courier introduces himself to a wrinkled woman standing on the street next to him ("Joey," he calls himself today, a name he pulled from a caravan-guard's faithful hound some weeks ago). There's a great big gathering going on tonight—wagons circled, campfires burning, the local watering hole so full the people the crowd spills out into the street. A holiday, maybe. Or else an impromptu festival, the natural result of two trade caravans finding the same town at the same time.

Caesar would condemn it. Men here to drink away their regrets, men here to sate their lusts. Ulysses cannot find it in him to hate it, though he knows that he should. He's set apart from these people, marked as an outsider by the flag on his back and the scowl on his face, but even so their simple happiness is a comfort of its own. 

There's a joy in watching the wastelanders thrive. Like seeing green shoots bursting from between cracks in the hard, dry earth.

None of the crowd approach him—each assuming he's some other caravan's bodyguard, Ulysses is sure—and so Ulysses is able to focus on the courier and let the noise and movement of the crowds flow around him like a river.

He watches the courier ingratiate himself among these strangers: he shares story after story, is given drink after drink, until he has a crowd of admirers gathered in a loose circle around him and hanging on his every word. Both he and Ulysses came here tonight as strangers, and yet in the span of a few hours the man has managed _this_.

It's a strange sort of charisma the courier possesses, as different from Caesar's overwhelming will as it's possible to be but no less powerful. No one else seems to see the danger in it. Ulysses wonders what it would take to make them see. 

Wonders, too, what he would have seen not so long ago. Would he have reacted this way if their paths crossed during the courier's brief time at the Divide? Would he have known the viper for its fangs, or would he have heard those kind words and watched that sweet smile and been... charmed?

( _Charmed_ , Ulysses thinks, and for a moment he can hardly breathe as his mind fills in an image—skin against skin, hands tangled in hair—of what being _charmed_ by this man must be like. The thought is sickening, of course it is sickening. It leaves his heart racing and his palms sweating.)

He turns away from the crowd, forcing back the thoughts crowding at him suddenly—and the courier is _there_. He can't hide the panic that flashes across his face, or the graceless fumble he makes for his weapon.

"Sorry!" the courier says. Hands up. Unarmed. As if he needed a weapon to be a threat. "Didn't mean to take you by surprise."

Ulysses cannot find the words to form an answer. It takes all his self control not to shoot the courier in the head where he stands.

(Would that finally kill him? The caravaneers speak in whispers; they say this one isn't human. That he cannot die. Blind superstition is a fool's game, but this man...)

The courier glances up and down. Takes in Ulysses' stillness, his frozen expression and the way he's clutching at his gun, and takes one slow step forward like he's trying to settle a spooked animal.

"You're a courier, aren't you? Or you used to be. Not trying to bother you. Just thought—seemed a shame for someone to be alone on a night like tonight." He offers Ulysses one of those too-perfect smiles; the rest of him is scarred and beaten, but his teeth are near-white and he still has all of them. "There's room here, if you want to join in. People here will be happy to meet you. Everyone likes hearing a courier's stories."

Of course they do. That's how this one won them over, after all. Everyone loves a story—if it's untrue, all the better. Lies are cleaner. 

There's another long silence between them, each of them staring at the other, and then the courier's face twists with something approaching regret. "Look. I'll leave you be. No need for trouble between us, right?"

 _No need._ As if there isn't trouble between them already.

Ulysses watches the courier head back towards the safety of the crowds, watches him disappear back into a circle of waiting admirers, before he slips off towards the edge of the crowd. This celebration of excess feels suddenly disgusting to him. He needs, desperately, to hole away somewhere where none of them can find him.

(He wants to pull the courier back, hold him here until he realizes _why_ Ulysses acted how he did. He knows what the courier thinks of him now—a man gives him a smile that might be more than friendly and he reacts with violence, there's men enough like that in the Bear and Bull alike—and the mere idea that what's between them might boil down to attraction, or lack thereof, is absurd. Insulting.)

The courier acts like he can't be hurt. Clearly his brashness has been rubbing off on Ulysses.

-

After that disaster, Ulysses is more careful. He keeps distance enough that the courier won't notice him, tracks him the way he would track a wounded deathclaw: carefully, quietly, and always with respect. 

Letting himself be noticed was a mistake, one he can't afford to make again. So Ulysses follows from afar. And he watches.

The courier is not a handsome man. Not by any stretch of the imagination. His eyes are dark and plain, his ribs show through his taut skin on days when he sits on the bank of the Colorado River with his clothes hung out to dry. His body is marked with scars that stand out, red and angry, against his brown skin: left pinky missing above the joint of his first knuckle, a close-range constellation of shrapnel wounds dotting his forehead, wiry frame marked by dogs' teeth and men's knives alike. 

There should be nothing about him that draws Ulysses' eye. There _is_ nothing, truly, except for the unbreakable bond of their shared history. 

That bond is enough to tether Ulysses here, high on a rocky cliff above the courier's riverside camp. Downwind, today, because the courier has brought his dog with him. 

The creature next to the courier bears the mark of the Bull, but it has long since found a new master. It's curled up in a loose circle with one mechanical leg stretched out and kicking occasionally. Its tail thumps loosely against the red dirt as its master strokes between its ears.

By Caesar's law, he should shoot it. It's Legion property in the hands of the Legion's enemy. But Ulysses has never, will never, raise a hand against it. Dogs are loyal; it isn't the creature's fault it's decided to love the courier.

The courier looks every bit as relaxed as his hound. He sits on the shore with his ankles in the river, pants rolled up and his bare chest dotted with drops of water. A makeshift clothesline's strung from one rock to another a few feet away, his jacket and shirt thrown lazily over it

Like this, close by and yet unnoticed, Ulysses almost feels close to the courier. He can imagine himself clambering down the rocks, joining him in the river. The courier courts strange allies: the doctor who dotes on him, the Brotherhood woman who still believes in her people's greatness, the stoic and bitter sniper...

The idea's absurd, of course, but it's almost easy to imagine himself as one of them. Another lost little brahmin calf, desperate for a shepherd to follow and as loyal to the man as his dog is.

For a moment, he lets his mind drift. 

The sun is high in the sky, hot, and the river below refreshingly cold. He imagines himself as yet another of the courier's allies: stripping down on the shoreline next to the courier, sliding into the Colorado's waters. A knotted muscle in his calf, the one that's been bothering him, eases as he rubs circles in his skin while the water runs over it, and then the courier takes note. 

In Ulysses's hazy, dreamlike thoughts, he smiles. Draws closer, clever hands reaching for him. Says, "Here, let me," in that laughing voice of his as he takes Ulysses leg into his grasp and presses against it, draws away weeks' worth of tension with his fingers digging into the knot.

Ulysses is aching. His body feels hot, tight, and this is almost—

Foolish. _Foolish_. Pure, base stupidity, the insinuations the courier made that last time they met clinging to his skin like brambles. He scrambles back from his perch up on the outcropping, heart racing, barely remembering to stay quiet. As quickly as he's able, he drops from ledge to ledge, desperate for distance. 

Everything is wrong. Ulysses needs space, needs to remember what he's here for. Needs to be away from _him_.

Finally, Ulysses' feet hit the rocky banks of the Colorado. He walks it until he's far enough away that he won't be heard, and then he plunges his hands into the river's water and splashes it against his face. Cold, bracing, and not enough; he strips off clothes and armor until he's free of anything the current would destroy, and then he dives straight in.

It's like being struck. The chill of it shocks him all the way down to his bones, until all he can focus on is his own shivering body and the tug of the current trying to pull him under.

This is what he needed, he thinks. These waters flow through that Old World wall, a reminder of all he's seen. They cleanse him.

Only when he is shivering too hard to think does he pull himself back onto dry land. For a while, he stays there: wrung out, lying on the riverbank, letting the fading sunlight dry his body and his sopping-wet hair.

Even now, he feels tethered to the courier.

When his mind is back together, he dresses himself once more. Runs a hand through his hair, raises his flagpole spear in his hand to feel its reassuring weight. 

Ulysses is confused, spirit torn by the man who raised the Divide and then tore it down, but it's no matter. Soon, all this will be over. When the courier dies, every damaged part of him will finally be able to mend.

The sun is nearly set by the time he feels ready to resume his pursuit. He spends the night alone, camped against the side of a rocky slope. By the time he returns to the courier's campground, man and dog have both left it behind—headed further upriver, no doubt. 

It takes him a day to find the courier's new trail, another two to spot the man once more. His hatred, black and bitter and as thick as bile, nourishes him all the while.

-

Somewhere north of Primm, Ulysses' knife finds its way into a raider's throat. 

_Finds_ its way. As if it were guided by fate. By chance. As if each of them here walking this road weren't responsible for their own actions. No.

Ulysses kills a raider somewhere north of Primm, is what happens. Lone hunter, more carrion-eater than coyote, but it's clear he thinks himself alpha mongrel from the way he hardly bothers to hide his tracks as he stalks his prey across the Mojave scrub. (Ulysses, following the follower, never so much as starts a fire. He knows how to travel the couriers' routes, decode the couriers' signs. An understanding he and his true target share.)

Normally he would do nothing. No worry of his if the courier is killed, and no chance the courier will be killed anyway. He's seen the man fight; he seems graceless and downright clumsy right up until the moment the bullets start flying. But the courier is injured, took a bad bite helping a settlement clear out a pack of mongrel dogs a few days back, and he refuses to slow even as his limp grows worse and his smile grows thin. Messenger's instincts in him, even if that's not his role these days; he'd never even think of slowing his route. 

The scavenger was once a Powder Ganger, or maybe a Viper. One of those miserable little tribes fighting for power in Caesar's looming shadow. They'll be scrabbling at each other's throats right up until the moment the Bull crushes them under its hooves. This one's been cut off even from that, though, if his solitude and the mud staining his torn leather armor are any indication. Too loathsome for even the roaches, but his exile has done him some good; it's clear he knows how to pick off weakened prey.

The courier is alone out here. Didn't bring his pet machine or his pet doctor. No sniper to keep watch, no dog or scar-skinned ghoul to scare the opportunists away. The raider waits for a cloudless night, with the courier holed up in a makeshift tent in a burned-out building—infection-borne fever ravaging him by now, Ulysses is sure, the man's too stubborn to stop—and then he finally makes his move.

Ulysses is holed up only a few houses down, curled up on the burned-out beams of what was once some child's bedroom. Melted-plastic crib behind him, half a roof above him, and a wall knocked away giving him a perfect view of the raider's knife gleaming in the moonlight.

For a moment, he cannot move. Thinks: _this could be it_. Stay still, stay silent, let the courier die like a lamb put to slaughter. Let him die unknowing, never understanding what he's done, never realizing just why he deserves the death he's about to receive, never once looking Ulysses in the eyes _properly_ —

It's not until his feet smack against the first-floor rubble that he realizes he's made a decision. Five long strides and the loose gravel shifts under his feet and the raider hears him, turns, too late, has just enough time to suck in a breath to plead before the knife draws a line across his throat.

Messy. Close kills always are. Blood sprays like a geyser from the canyon he's carved in the skin. The body hits the ground with the loud, wet thump of meat against stone.

Ulysses freezes. Waits, breath caught in his throat, heart thudding loud and heavy in his chest, for the courier to wake. An image flashes through his mind: the flap of the tent opening, the courier staring out with eyes that are fever-bright and still so aware, as mesmerizing as an adder with its fangs an inch from Ulysses' throat. Saying, _Ah. Hello. I knew someone was following me._

A moment passes. Another, another. Nothing moves. The tent doesn't rustle, the courier doesn't appear.

Ulysses sighs and smears fresh blood across his skin as he runs a hand down his face. Wonders, for a moment, what he would have done if the man had appeared.

No time to sit around and think. There's work needs done still. He drags the slowly-draining corpse to the bonelike frame of a nearby house, settles it in among the rubble so it's not so apparent from afar. Animals will find it. Couriers won't. 

After, he finds himself in front of the closed flap of the tent. A moment's hesitation, and then he steps inside.

The courier is curled up on the hard-packed ground, wrapped in brahmin skins and sweating. His face is flushed. His eyes are half-open and unseeing. He's helpless, halfway to a corpse already, and even from here he smells of oozing infection. The bright passion that makes him impossible to ignore is entirely absent now. He's only a man, and a dying one at that.

Ulysses wouldn't even need to raise his blade. All he has to do is stand here and let the sickness continue its ravaging path, and the Mojave's spirits will take the courier tonight.

He imagines it: imagines a corpse in place of the man suffering here, imagines dragging a body outside for the crows to eat and finally being _done_. Imagines the Divide, alone and empty, forgotten by even the man who killed it.

With a sigh, Ulysses walks back outside. Scrub enough to start a fire, supplies enough to make a poultice... the courier doesn't know the Twisted Hairs' recipes, but he keeps bundles of herbs on him all the same—to make medicines of his own invention or simply for trade, Ulysses isn't sure. 

There's enough here to make a poultice. Draw out the infection, soothe the angry flesh, just like the Twisted Hairs taught him long ago.

(And for a moment he thinks of them, the Twisted Hairs, long-dead before he ever found the Divide, slain by their own hubris and the fox's cruel tongue, and he's overwhelmed with something that could almost be—)

Ulysses shakes the shadows out of his head. Old deaths, those. No use thinking on them now.

He gathers the brush for a fire, takes an iron-cast pot from the courier's supplies and fills it with the courier's water. Sitting beside the fire, waiting for the water to boil, he takes his fingers to his own hair.

There's messages carried in his braids, messages he's the only one alive who can still understand. His losses, his victories. How many he's killed. Tonight, thinking of the body cooling in the shell of the burnt-out building, he begins braiding the raider's death into his hair. 

The repetitive motions allow his mind to wander. Again and again, he finds his thoughts circling the same winding path: he imagines stalking back into that tent and earning himself a braid to match the one he's shaping now. The courier's blood splashing across his hands, the courier's breathing slowing until it rattles to a halt.

The idea twists his stomach. He doesn't know why.

-

And then there is the Divide. The Divide, and the machine, and the Courier's Mile, and the man he has come to know better than any other person under the sun refusing flat-out to fight him. Refusing and talking instead—talking and talking and _talking_. Talking when Ulysses snarls back, talking when Ulysses tries to goad him to fight, talking when Ulysses slips and loses his composure. Never faltering.

(When Ulysses accuses him of greed, conquering New Vegas for his own, he does not grow angry. When Ulysses rages at him, throws the memories of the dead at him like a clumsy-handled grenade, he _apologizes_. It is too much. It is too much, and Ulysses cannot—)

Talking until Ulysses can finally see it, the culmination of his dream: the Bear suffering the way the Divide suffered, a blow struck to cripple the twin heads—and, with it, the deaths of thousands. Bodies lying in the roads, innocents with their skin flayed raw and bloody and unable to die. Will that be the end of it, finally? Or will some other man find some temple of their own where the Old World's power sleeps still?

(So easy to imagine. The sins of centuries ago, committed again and again. He will be nothing more than another link in the chain of a neverending war.) 

Talking—until Ulysses folds.

Ulysses is not too proud a man to know when he is broken, and when his knees hit the concrete of the ancient silo (its gods looming massive and cold and quiet above him: no fire streaming from their bellies, no nuclear rain to fall on the heads of Caesar's enemies), he can tell that his soul has snapped like a twig.

He's felt this only once before. The last day of the Twisted Hairs, the moment he gave up his name and became _Legion_. 

He survived that. He does not know if he will survive this.

A distant noise brings him back to the world. There are marked men slamming at the doors, wild with rage, their screams as raw as their skin. He brought them here, stoked their fury and pain. They'll be happy to slaughter him with the courier.

"Ulysses," the courier says, and then there is a hand on his shoulder and another keeping him from falling over completely. "Can you stand?"

 _Can you fight?_ , he should be asking. Ulysses' fault their lives are in danger, he has every right to demand his help. And yet... nothing. No anger, no demands. No weapon pushed into Ulysses' hands. Just calm, steady concern.

 _You wouldn't last in the Legion,_ Ulysses thinks to him, and he nods and pushes himself onto unsteady feet.

Ulysses' twin machines hover behind him still. They scan him in unison as he rises to his full height, humming artificial concern. Following the flag, not the man wearing it, but Ulysses too has been following this flag for some time now. All three of them headed in the same direction. It's almost fondness that he feels when he looks at them; when he turns to see the courier's own machine scrapped at the foot of the silo controls, he feels something that's almost guilt.

The courier nods at him as he slings his rifle off his shoulder. "They're coming."

Ulysses nods. Let them come.

-

He does not know how they survive. Only that they do. 

The courier leans against the wall with his armor torn open where a marked man marked him, dripping blood and smiling wide and joyful with a circle of corpses at his feet. Ulysses feels twenty years older than when he woke this morning. The twin machines, survivors still, hover behind him making mechanical noises of concern.

He's fine, he wants to tell them. Knows they won't listen. It's not how they're programmed.

His submachine gun fell empty halfway through, forcing him to switch to Old Glory. The flag feels heavy with the weight of the bodies he plunged it through. It flicks little sprays of blood against the floor when he twists it in his hands. Finally, he has to strap it to his back once more. He's afraid he might drop it otherwise.

 _Alive_. The word is lighter than air, the heaviest thing he has ever had to bear. He was supposed to join the courier here, in battle and then in death. And now...

Tonight he'll see the stars. Tomorrow, the sunrise. What after? 

The endless stretch of days feels suffocating. The possibilities winding out in front of him are a more treacherous road than any he has walked before. All he can see are pitfalls: mistakes he might make, pain he might cause others, legacies of blood and horror that he might leave behind.

He does not know what to do.

Ulysses looks over at the courier, and he wants—

—he wants what he has wanted for months now. What he wanted when the courier approached him, what he wanted when he watched over the sleeping courier's form. 

He'd told himself that it was hatred he felt towards the man, and he hadn't been wrong. His pain was too great, his rage too overwhelming, to allow him anything else. Now, emptied of that hatred, he finally can understand what lingered all along in its shadow.

 _There are things I could teach you_ , Ulysses wants to say. _Stories I could tell you, places I could show you..._

As if a pretty speech could sway him, as if Ulysses's promises could make the courier want a man who tried so hard to kill him.

Doesn't matter either way. When Ulysses opens his mouth, the only thing that comes out is a rattling noise like a corpse's last breath. He wheezes for air, the weight of all he's been carrying suddenly so much heavier than it has ever been has before, and when his lungs finally feel full again the first thing he does is laugh.

It's a sad noise. Pathetic. Small. But it fills the air all the same. How long has it been since he felt like this?

"Ulysses," the courier says. He moves closer. It's concern that Ulysses sees in his face, not hatred, and when he lays a hand on Ulysses' shoulder his touch is gentle. "I..." 

_Concern_ , Ulysses thinks. Yes. And something deeper than that, something he dares not name for fear of realizing he's deluded himself once more.

The courier frowns, worrying at his lip. Finally, he says, "You don't have to stay here. Come with me. _Please_."

It would be irresponsible of Ulysses to ask any more of this man. To believe the future is his to decide anymore. His home is the dead and withered Divide; he risked the Mojave to avenge it, he deserves no other fate than solitude.

All the same, he cannot help taking his own step forward. His hands lift up—one resting on the courier's shoulder, the other cupping the courier's face—like a wounded man begging for aid, and what comes out of his mouth isn't denial.

"Yes," he says, in this moment lost for anything more complex. "Thank you, yes."

He leans forward, his heart thumping as quick as a crow's wingbeats, terrified that he might be wrong, to close that final gap between them.

And the courier meets him there.

**Author's Note:**

>  _Tell me about a complicated man._  
>  _Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost_  
>  -The Odyssey, as translated by Emily Wilson


End file.
